Pear Analytics

Hi, everyone. You may or may not have noticed recently that our sign-up for SiteJuice has changed. In fact, you can no longer sign up for SiteJuice as it was before. Instead, you now have the option to sign up for the SiteJuice 2.0 beta in anticipation of when it launches in the coming weeks.

We know this might come as a bit of a shock, so we took the time to sit down with Pear Analytics CEO Ryan Kelly to get you some answers. We demanded satisfaction!

PABLO: What happened to SiteJuice? I tried to recommend it to a friend and when they went there it was gone. You made a monkey out of me.
RYAN KELLY: Sorry about that. I have some banana treats for you if that will make you feel better. After a year of developing SiteJuice, we decided to retool and go back to the basics. Everything is being re-engineered from the ground up as we speak, and we’re inviting folks into our private beta, which we will launch in waves after July 4th.

Probably the most burning question for anyone familiar with SiteJuice would simply be: why the change?
To be honest, the old SiteJuice sucked. It was slow, buggy, and people just didn’t understand it. We tried to build too many features instead of focusing on the great ones. Some of our coolest and most useful features were hidden. Now, you will see a simpler, faster and more actionable interface.

Give the readers a sneak preview of what they are signing up for in the new SiteJuice?
In a few weeks, we will invite you to see the analysis we did on the website you gave us when you sign up for the beta. It won’t be jam-pakced with a thousand features, but rather 15-20 really important things you should be looking at in terms of basic SEO for your website, and how to go about fixing them if they need fixing.

When will we finally get flying cars?
Everyone in the world will completely understand SEO before that happens.

How is the new SiteJuice different from all the other SEO tools out there?
Every tool out there (and we’ve used pretty much all of them) focuses on one thing or another, but none of them at the individual page level.  Our goal is to analyze every single page of your website and tell you what needs work and how to fix it in a way you can understand.  No information overload here, or tech speak – just the essentials you need to know to drive more traffic page by page.

For our old subscribers and clients, what do they need to know?
Anyone on the old SiteJuice can continue to use it the same way they have been. Paying subscribers will continue to get support, whereas the freeloaders will have to… well… buzz off, or sign over to SiteJuice 2.0.

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We’d like to thank Ryan for taking the time to answer questions about SiteJuice 2.0 beta. It’s an exciting time at Pear Analytics. We hope you’re as excited as we are. Keep following our updates as we get closer to launching the beta.

No Comments »Tags: beta, interview, ryan kelly, Sitejuice

We wanted to write this blog post to help you understand the accuracy of our data, just in case you were thinking of canceling your subscription

Where we get our data from

We get our data directly from Google, Yahoo and Bing’s API’s.  Some of the information is free, and some of it is not.  The information related to search volume, competitiveness and getting keyword suggestions is something we have to pay for.  We make roughly 3-4 million calls per month to the Google API to get this data, and it’s not exactly cheap.  However, what we get from the API’s can be different that what you might see in the Google External Keyword Tool, or other front-facing applications that can get this information.  We suspect the search engines selfishly like to keep the latest and greatest data to themselves, and probably lag the data available in the API.  This causes a mismatch in what we are getting and what you might be seeing from Google directly.

On another note, Google is a bit finicky in getting search volumes.  If you see that search volume is “0″ and you know for a fact that is wrong, there is a reason why.  Google will only give us the search volume data if the keyword is relevant.  In other words, they don’t want us sitting there hitting the API and caching all their data, so what we’re asking for has to be tied to a URL and has to be somewhat relevant, otherwise they will return null information.

We also use the Alexa API for Competitor Monitoring, and recently removed the Compete.com API since it was causing reports to error out.  We also use the W3C validation tools as an open source application on our servers to run your HTML and CSS validation tests.  We DO NOT screen scrape any data whatsoever.

Why are my rankings off in Keyword Watch?

If you are seeing a result in a Google ranking for a keyword that is different that when you type it in and search for it yourself, it could be related to personalized search.  We get your keyword rankings straight from the Google API, and we request this from a random server in Dallas.  If you routinely search for yourself by doing Google searches, you may have personalized search turned on, which will almost always give you a higher result than you really have.  For example, you may be seeing that you rank #4 for a keyword, when in fact you rank #9 or #10.

We test our data daily

Every day we run a 35-point test on at least two random reports that were run in the last 24 hours.  We check the data against some other tools to see how were fare.  For example, we test keyword rankings with the SEOBook Rank Checker plugin for FireFox.  We check the HTML and CSS validation directly with the W3c.  We check your inbound links directly with Yahoo SiteExplorer, and we query the page including and excluding links from interior pages.  We check your load time and page size with Pingdom.com to see what they get.  If any of the data is off by more than 5%, we create a trouble ticket and our development team looks into the problem and deploys a fix.

Are you seeing other data inconsistencies?  We’d like to know about them.  We can look into the issue, deploy a fix and re-run your report usually within 24 to 48 hours.

Update May 21, 2010 4;45p

The last two tests we ran scored over 80% accurate.  We are still having some issues detecting the meta keyword tag properly so we can populate the Keyword Watch feature, and sometimes pages with a Google PageRank of “0″ show “4″.  We are also working on getting the proper inbound link number for the domain that INCLUDES links from interior pages.  Search volume has been difficult to get “on the fly” and you may be seeing “0″ for many terms.  We are working on a fix for this.  Lastly, the HTML/CSS validation checks are all coming in as “passing” when many have errors.  We will have a fix for this next week.

No Comments »Tags: data accuracy, data consistency, Sitejuice

If you are a current SiteJuice user, and tou’ve recently received your website report by email and now you are wondering what Current Site Value and Potential Site Value are and the differences between them.  This post will help you understand how we cam up with this, what it means, and what we’re doing to improve it.  If you are not currently using SiteJuice, you can get a 30-day free trial.

Overview

What we are attempting to show you is the value of your SEO efforts compared to what it would cost you to purchase all of the search volume in a paid search environment.  Many times we are asked “how much should I spend on SEO”, or “how much market share do I have on these keywords”.

Current Site Value

This is calculated by taking all of the keywords in your SiteJuice account by domain, and adding up their cumulative value based on 1) where you rank for the word; 2) how much search volume that word gets, and how much you may get as a result of your position organically; and 3) what it would cost to buy that word in a PPC environment.

Example: your keyword has a search volume of 1,000 searches per month, you rank #2 for that word, and it costs $5 per click in PPC.

Word Value = 1,000 searches per month x 18% of traffic from a #2 position x $5 per click = $900

We know based on research and other data we have gathered, what the approximate number of clicks you may get for the first 30 positions in Google.  After position 30, the value is defaulted to “$0″.  Now we can calculate your Current Site Value by adding up the word values for all keywords and all pages.

Read the rest of this entry »

13 Comments »Tags: SiteJuice Updates

We’d like to thank you for trying out SiteJuice as your SEO Tool.  Some of the feedback we’ve received shows us that the tool is not as intuitive as we initially thought, and we’re working hard to make some usability changes. This is not something we can accomplish in a week, so we’re launching the next best thing: live chat!

We’re excited to announce the availability of live chat today to help answer your questions in real time, so we encourage you to use this feature when something isn’t obvious, or you’re getting frustrated with the UI.

Or if you’re bored and just want to chat with Graham, Ryan, or Vid.

If you’ve never used a live chat feature before, it’s rather simple. There is now a link in the header at the top right you can click which will launch a separate window for the chat. Enter a screen name with your question and click submit to get started. You’ll automatically be connected to one of us here who can help you. That’s all there is to it!  If we happen to be unavailable, you can still submit a question through the chat window and we will get on it right away.

A few things we’re working on:

• making the user interface more intuitive.  Some folks have mentioned that the green banner is confusing and looks like primary navigation, and everything else is sub navigation.
• There are a couple of bugs in Link Analysis and Keyword Watch.  You may see some keywords come up with no search volume, or the position is incorrect.  Link Analysis is not scoring each link properly in some cases.
• We’re going to put an “In process” indicator for ech new keyword that you add to Keyword Watch, and also add a button to allow you to add all of the keyword suggestions at once.
• Competitor Monitoring may show you some competitors in the list that you did not add…..we believe we fixed that this morning

Please continue to provide feedback – we appreciate your support!

No Comments »Tags: site juice updates, vid luther

Dear Beta Testers,

We released an update to the Settings page this week that should make the process much easier.  Here is what the changes are:

1.  Now you simply add a page to your account, and we break it out into the domain/page hierarchy for you.  No more having to create the domain, and then the pages under it.

2.  It will be easier to see what reports are currently running.  You’ll see the last report ran for each domain, as well as what’s currently running in the queue.  An email will still be sent when the analysis is complete.

3.  Now you can edit and delete domains, pages and competitors.  When you delete a page, that page and all of its history will be deleted.  When you edit a page, the old version will be deleted, and we will start tracking the new version since we assume that it was primarily a typo.

4.  There is now the ability to archive domains and the pages and competitors associated with them.  For SEO consultants, this might be useful if you work with several clients and you want to move one into an inactive status.  Analysis on those domains, pages and competitors will stop until they are unarchived.  Once unarchived, the analysis will resume and all of the previous data will be available.

Thanks for all your feedback, keep it coming, and we’ll keep making Sitejuice better for you.

Not using SiteJuice yet?  Sign up here.

1 Comment »Tags: SiteJuice Updates